SAT English Practice Question

\section{Passage 1}I have shown how democracy destroys or modifies the different inequalities which originate in society; but is this all? or does it not ultimately affect that great inequality of man and woman which hasseemed, up to the present day, to be eternally based in human nature? I believe that the social changes which bring nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and servant, and superiors and inferiors generally speaking, will raise woman andmake her more and more the equal of man. But here, more than ever, I feel the necessity of making myself clearly understood; for there is no subject on which the coarse and lawless fancies of our age have taken a freer range.There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant20 to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things-their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be conceived, that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded; and from so preposterous a medley of 25 the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be established between the sexes. They admit, that as 30 nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral constitution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that improvement does not consist in making beings 35 so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in getting each of them to fulfill their respective tasks in the best possible manner. The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which governs the manufactures of our age, 40 by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman, in order that the great work of society may be the better carried on.\section{Passage 2}As society was constituted until the last few generations, inequality was its very basis; association 45 grounded on equal rights scarcely existed; to be equals was to be enemies; two persons could hardly coöperate in anything, or meet in any amicable relation, without the law's appointing that one of them should be the superior of the other.50 Mankind have outgrown this state, and all things now tend to substitute, as the general principle of human relations, a just equality, instead of the dominion of the strongest. But of all relations, that between men and women, being the nearest and55 most intimate, and connected with the greatest number of strong emotions, was sure to be the last to throw off the old rule, and receive the new; for, in proportion to the strength of a feeling is the tenacity with which it clings to the forms and60 circumstances with which it has even accidentally become associated. ...... The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to. What this is, cannot be ascertained without complete 65 liberty of choice.... Let every occupation be open to all, without favor or discouragement to any, and employments will fall into the hands of those men or women who are found by experience to be most capable of worthily exercising them. There need be70 no fear that women will take out of the hands of men any occupation which men perform better than they. Each individual will prove his or her capacities, in the only way in which capacities can be proved,-by trial; and the world will have the benefit of the best75 faculties of all its inhabitants. But to interfere beforehand by an arbitrary limit, and declare that whatever be the genius, talent, energy, or force of mind, of an individual of a certain sex or class, those faculties shall not be exerted, or shall be exerted only80 in some few of the many modes in which others are permitted to use theirs, is not only an injustice to the individual, and a detriment to society, which loses what it can ill spare, but is also the most effectual way of providing that, in the sex or class so fettered, the85 qualities which are not permitted to be exercised shall not exist. In Passage 1, Tocqueville implies that treatment of men and women as identical in nature would have which consequence?

1. A.Neither sex would feel oppressed.
2. B.Both sexes would be greatly harmed.
3. C.Men would try to reclaim their lost authority.
4. D.Men and women would have privileges they do not need.